The present invention relates generally to an electronic information display apparatus, an electronic information display method, a program, and a recording medium that are intended to display electronic information such as newspapers and magazines.
For example, some of the display apparatuses such as mobile information processing terminal apparatuses capture the electronic information of newspapers and magazines and display the captured electronic information on a display device. In the case of mobile information terminal apparatuses, their display screens are inherently limited in size, so that the electronic information is displayed on smaller screens than those of actual newspapers and magazines. Consequently, if the page space images of newspapers and magazines are displayed as they are, the letters become too small to be legible.
To overcome this problem, related-art technologies link text-form headers with text-form news items as with electronic bookstores and general Web newspaper sites to display the text-form headers as well as the news items linked with selected headers.
However, with actual newspapers and magazines, the information is laid out such that the readers can understand at a glance which news items are most important or which news items are currently much talked about. Therefore, it is essential to consider the page space layouts when displaying the information contained in newspapers and magazines onto information terminal apparatuses.
In the above-mentioned conventional technologies, however, only a list of headers in text form is displayed without the page space images of newspapers and magazines, so that it is difficult for the readers to understand by intuition the weighting of the news items on newspapers and magazines.
Some other technologies allow the readers to select desired news items from the page space images of the electronic information (refer to patent document 1 and patent document 2 below for example). For example, the technology disclosed in patent document 1 displays desired positions on each paper space image in a zoom-in manner by use of the zoom-in capability having a variable zoom-in ratio, thereby displaying enlarged electronic information in the magnified area. The technology disclosed in patent document 2 displays the frame of an news item area as a page space image and, when this portion is selected by a touch pad operation for example, displays the contents of the news item in this portion.
Patent document 1: Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 2001-249746
Patent document 2: Japanese Patent Laid-open No. Hei 8-265556
However, the technology disclosed in patent document 1, which displays a desired position in a page space of electronic information in a magnified manner involves a problem of having to move a desired position in each case to the zoom-in position. Especially, in the case of small mobile terminals, because of their small display screens, the area by which a position to be magnified is restricted, thereby making it difficult to specify a desired area to be read on a large page space image.
The technology disclosed in patent document 2, which allows the selection of a news item area by displaying the frame of that area displays the selected news item area as a page space but does not display the letters and photographs in that area as a page space image, thereby making it impossible for the readers to grasp the image of the news item as it is with the actual images of pages of newspapers and magazines.